Gurval Caer

By Gurval Caer, CEO of Blast Radius

The stomachs of B2B marketers around the world should be churning at the prospect of the economic down turn and tightening wallets. Smart marketers will already be reassessing their strategies and transitioning away from advertising and one-way communications, simply because tech savvy businesses are actively avoiding it: they change the channel, turn the page, filter emails to spam or ignore banner ads.

Against the background of increasing difficulty in justifying significant investment in advertising, marketers are moving to mediums which engage businesses in dialog and hence achieve stronger customer loyalty and lead generation with a significantly smaller budget and greater measurability.

Well designed multichannel campaigns provide the best opportunity for businesses to engage with their audiences. For example, businesses with such websites can empower their customers to tailor products by cherry-picking additional features and functions and simulating how it would work. This ability provides customers with a sense of ownership and familiarity of the brand that advertising alone could never provide. Furthermore, this sense of ownership and control is highly effective in transporting customers from the design and interaction phase to purchasing their customised product online. 

Strategic websites can also assist companies to build a community of advocates around their brand, even at the simple level of providing customers with a dedicated forum or blog on which to post feedback, comments and ideas. This very powerful feature is only truly effective when the organisation participates and fosters open and healthy debate amongst its audience, and shows them that the company respects their ideas and listens to their suggestions. This does more for brands than any advertising ever could.   

The financial pressures that marketers are feeling will bring the effectiveness of traditional advertising into question. Those who thrive in this economic climate will have stopped pushing messages at customers and worked at building their brand relevance; engaging with them through multiple channels, integrating their brand into customer's daily operations and enabling satisfied customers to spread positive sentiment amongst their peers.

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